Jane Goodall: Mother to Us All

Jane Goodall brought her grand, epic life story to a sold-out audience at the Lesher Center for the Arts’ Newsmaker lecture series Tuesday.

While countries and institutions bestow the silver-haired, soft-spoken primatologist with awards—England’s Dame of the British Empire and Japan’s Kyoto Prize, to name just two—Goodall continues to tell what is, essentially, a mother-daughter tale.

“At 5, I was on holiday with my family,” Goodall began, in the first of many memories she shared. “It was my job to collect the eggs from the hen house.”

Intrigued by the mystery of how an egg emerged from a hen—on which she could see no hole large enough—Goodall moved in for closer observation. She scared the hen and recalled thinking, This is no longer a safe place.

Sensitive to the hen’s discomfort, Goodall hid in the coop and waited. Hours later, she emerged, jubilantly bringing her egg-laying report to her mother, who had conducted a search and finally called the police to find her daughter.

Goodall said it was her good fortune that she had a mother who, at this and many other times, chose to take pleasure in her discoveries instead of expressing irritation at having suffered parental angst.

When Goodall met famed anthropologist and paleontologist Louis Leakey and was subsequently hired by him to study chimpanzees in Gombe, her mother accompanied her to Africa.

“The British insisted I have a companion,” Goodall said, reminding everyone that a 26-year-old woman in 1960 was at a serious disadvantage when it came to scientific research and independent travel.

“My mother became much more than a companion,” Goodall said, describing how her mother boosted her morale by insisting she not give in to early discouragement.

Because of her mother’s support, she discovered a “cast of characters” in the chimpanzees.

Goodall spoke, as if they were her children: Mike, who used four empty tin cans to add ferocity to his charging displays, and David, who helped the other chimps lose their fear of Goodall.

She learned that protective, supportive, playful mothers raised the most relaxed offspring. She witnessed baby chimps learning through imitation and observation, practices she called “one definition of culture.”

Most importantly for the research she was conducting, she saw the chimps fashion and use tools.

“A chimp took a blade of grass and dipped it in a narrow hole to get termites, which he ate,” she said, with obvious pride.

Less happily, she also saw that gang attacks and extreme violence by the males made the line dividing chimp and human behaviors “fuzzy.”

The one factor that differentiates us from chimps is language, Goodall said before posing this question: 

“How is it that this people with so much intellect are so quickly destroying the planet where we live?”

Answering that question—and stopping the destruction—are now her life’s work, keeping her on the road 300 days each year.

"I haven’t spent three consecutive weeks in one place since 1986,” she said.

A conference about the effect of deforestation on animal populations in October  1986 transformed her from a scientist to an activist.

“We’ve lost something called wisdom. We make decisions thinking, How will this affect me, now? How will this affect my family, my shareholders' meeting?”

Goodall said the solution is found in young people. They inspired her to start Roots & Shoots, a global program operating in 126 countries. Roots & Shoots educates, supports and partners with youths to identify and lead the way to solving environmental and humanitarian problems.

Goodall, claiming “our backs are to the wall,” listed four reasons for hope: youth, the human brain, the resilience of nature and the indomitable human spirit.

She implored the audience to think. To spend a few minutes each day considering how what they eat, practice, throw away and teach their children will impact our planet.